Saturday, July 30, 2022

Mr. Speakman awarded 10th degree black belt


(from Mr. Benny Urquidez' Facebook page)

On Thursday July 7, 2022, I was so very honored to be a part of history in the making and award my dear friend, Sensei Jeff Speakman, with the highest achievement in Martial Arts, his 10th Degree Blackbelt! It is well deserved and hard earned. He holds the integrity and honor system as a Master. Mentally HE creates it, verbally HE commands it, physically HE does it, and spiritually his desire is to keep KENPO KARATE as Mr. Parker would want it to be! I congratulate you, and I celebrate you! - Sensei Benny “The Jet” Urquidez.

 

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Saturday, July 23, 2022

Web of Knowledge complete - by group

Grabs and Tackles:

sword and hammer

mace of aggression 

delayed sword

clutching feathers

lone kimono

crossing talon

charging ram

darting mace

obscure sword

obscure wing

twin kimono

twirling wings

begging hands

racking mace

crossed twigs

gripping talon

broken ram

obscure claws

menacing twirl

conquering shield

intercepting the ram

glancing spear

desperate falcons

dominating circles

blinding sacrifice 

falling falcon

falcons of force

courting the tiger

grasping eagles

snakes of wisdom

marriage of the ram


Pushes:

alternating maces

triggered salute

glancing salute

repeating mace

snapping twig

parting wings

hooking wings

thrusting wedge

snaking talons

twist of fate

encounter with danger

leap from danger

fatal cross

circling windmills


Punches:

sword of destruction

attacking mace

dance of death

five swords 

shielding hammer

leaping crane

thundering hammers

shield and sword

sleeper

reversing mace

raining claw

flashing wings

shield and mace

flashing mace

gathering clouds

circling the horizon

circling destruction

circles of protection

taming the mace

kneel of compulsion

glancing wing

back breaker

thrust into darkness

leap of death

destructive fans

circling fans

protective fans

unfurling crane

bear and the ram

gathering of snakes

parting of the snakes

twirling hammers

destructive kneel

unfolding the dark

escape from darkness

prance of the tiger

the ram and the eagle

reprimanding the bears


Kicks:

deflecting hammer

thrusting salute

buckling branch

swinging pendulum

hugging pendulum

retreating pendulum 

detour from doom

circle of doom

rotating destruction

deceptive panther

destructive cross

bowing to buddha


Hugs and Holds:

captured twigs

gift of destruction

scraping hoof

striking serpent's head

crushing hammer

squeezing the peach

gift in return

spiraling twig

thrusting prongs

crashing wings

repeating devastation 

tripping arrow

gift of destiny 

squatting sacrifice

broken gift

twirling sacrifice


Locks and Chokes:

grasp of death

locking horns

grip of death

captured leaves

circling wing

bow of compulsion

cross of destruction

flight to freedom

locked wing

twisted twig

entangled wing

fallen cross

wings of silk

destructive twins

escape from death

heavenly ascent

cross of death


Weapons:

checking the storm

evading the storm

calming the storm

obstructing the storm 

defying the storm 

returning storm

brushing the storm

capturing the storm

securing the storm

clipping the storm

raining lance

glancing lance

thrusting lance

entwined lance

escape from the storm

circling the storm

piercing lance

capturing the rod

broken rod

defying the rod

twisted rod


2 Attacks 1 Man

dance of darkness

reversing circles

unwinding pendulum

entwined maces

fatal deviation


Wednesday, July 20, 2022

49 years since the passing of Bruce Lee

Newsweek article by Eve Watling

In the fall of 1972, Warner Bros offered Lee Enter the Dragon, the first of his films to be co-produced by a major American studio. Expectations were high when filming began in Hong Kong in January 1973. But on July 20, 1973, just six days before Enter the Dragon was set to be released, Bruce Lee died, suddenly and mysteriously. Perhaps in part because of that, Enter the Dragon became one of the highest-grossing films of 1973 and fueled a martial arts craze in the U.S. But how could a young man at the peak of physical fitness die so suddenly and inexplicably? That question, almost as much as his kung fu skills, has defined Bruce Lee's stardom.

Almost immediately, the rumor mill began running overtime: Hong Kong triads, a family curse, and even poisoning were all blamed for his death. That the married star had died in the house of his secret girlfriend, Betty Ting, fueled more rumors. More speculation surfaced in 1993, when Lee's actor son Brandon Lee died after being shot by a faulty prop gun on the set of The Crow.

In the 45 years since Bruce Lee's death, scientists, biographers and fans continue to speculate about what caused his cerebral edema, poring over the facts and rumors alike. Here's what we actually know about Bruce Lee's tragic death.

Officially, Lee's death was caused by a cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain caused by excess fluid. Although Lee's brain had swelled nearly 13 percent, the coroner found no evidence of external injury. So what caused the edema?

Signs of his poor health first appeared in May 1973, just weeks before Lee's death. Suffering from headaches and seizures, he was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed with his first cerebral edema. Lee didn't regain consciousness until the next day, when he flew to UCLA Medical Center for further testing. According to the Matthew Polly biography Bruce Lee: A Life, doctors diagnosed the actor as having suffered a grand mal seizure, but couldn't identify the cause. After the swelling subsided Lee appeared to be back in perfect health and was given the all clear. Shortly thereafter, he left the U.S. for an extended visit to Hong Kong.

July 20 started out like any other, except perhaps for the heat—it was 90 degrees, a humid summer day in Hong Kong. Lee spent the morning at his studio, discussing his upcoming film Game of Death. He ate a small amount of hash with a friend (Lee believed cannabis expanded his consciousness) before heading to Betty Ting's apartment in the early afternoon. According to Polly, the pair spent the next few hours having sex and consumed more hash. Raymond Chow, who was producing Game of Death, arrived at the apartment around 6pm. Already, Lee's ill health was apparent. "Bruce wasn't feeling very well," Chow told Polly. "I think we had some water… In telling the story [of Game of Death], he acted out the whole thing. So, that probably made him a little tired and thirsty. After a few sips he seemed to be a little dizzy."

Lee complained of a headache, so Ting gave him Equagesic, a combination tranquilizer and analgesic that he had purportedly taken before. He went to lie down in her bedroom but about two hours later, when Ting went to wake him, he was nonresponsive.

By the time the paramedics arrived, Bruce Lee was dead.

A full autopsy took place at Hong Kong's Queen Elizabeth Hospital a few days later. The medical examiner, Dr R. R. Lycette, found no signs of foul play but noted the hash and Equagesic in Lee's system. Lycette identified "congestions and edema of the brain," as the immediate cause of death but couldn't account for what caused the swelling.

In addition to his intense fitness regimen, Lee kept to a strict diet of vegetables, rice, fish and milk, and avoided refined flour and sugars. While he enjoyed marijuana, he didn't smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol or coffee. Still, the fact that he survived his first edema was miraculous; this time, he hadn't been so lucky. Cerebral edemas are extremely dangerous and can be caused by any number of factors, including head injuries, allergies and brain tumors. Questions still remain about how such a healthy young man could so suddenly and inexplicably die.

"I believe the most likely cause of death is cannabis intoxication," Lycette wrote in a letter, "either due to drug idiosyncrasy or massive overdose." But there has been no links between cannabis and cerebral edemas, and most researchers question whether it's even possible to fatally overdose on marijuana.

In September 1973, two months after Lee's death, forensics expert Donald Teare was assigned to the case. Teare, who carried out the autopsy of Jimi Hendrix just three years earlier, asserted Lee had a "hypersensitivity" to the active ingredients in Equagesic that led to his death. However, some people still believed that it was the hash, rather than the Equagesic, that killed the star. The doctors who treated him in May noted Lee had consumed hash that day, too. "We gave Bruce a long talk before he was discharged from hospital, asking him not to eat hashish again," said Dr Peter Wu in the 2000 biography The Tao of Bruce Lee. "We told him that his very low percentage of body fat could make him vulnerable to drugs." Wu also cautioned that his stress levels could dramatically magnify the effects of the hash. "Since he'd already had a very bad time with the drug, we told him that the effects were likely to be worse next time."

It's possible that Lee was hypersensitive to one or more of the drugs found in his system, but he had reportedly consumed them before with no ill effects. So could something else have killed Bruce Lee?

Over the years, a wide range of theories have emerged: At a comic convention in 1975, Chuck Norris, Lee's Way of the Dragon co-star and a pallbearer at his funeral, speculated Ting had given him antibiotics that reacted with medication Lee was taking for back pain. That theory was contradicted by Lee's autopsy, but it illustrates just how much misinformation was swirling around his death. Some blamed everything from bad feng shui to a magical curse, while others believed Lee's "death" was simply a hoax to promote Game of Death .

Advances in medicine since Lee's passing have led to even more conjecture about why he died: At a 2006 meeting of the American Academy of Sciences, medical examiner James Filkins postulated that Lee suffered a fatal epileptic seizure. SUDEP, or "sudden unexplained death in epilepsy," refers to the unexpected death of a seemingly healthy person with epilepsy, when no cause of death can been determined. But it wasn't coined until 1995, more than 20 years after Lee died. Seizures can be triggered by stress, which Lee was certainly under, but there's no record of him ever being diagnosed with epilepsy.

Polly offers another explanation: Bruce Lee died from heatstroke. In Bruce Lee: A Life, Polly claimed Lee had the sweat glands in his armpits removed so he would appear less sweaty on camera, and that after playing out all those fight scenes on a sweltering hot day in Hong Kong, his body gave out. Lee's symptoms on the day he died, including dizziness and headaches, are consistent with heatstroke, and cerebral edemas are often found in autopsies of people who have died of heatstroke. What's more, Lee's first edema in May took place in a hot editing room that lacked air conditioning. Like epilepsy, heatstroke was less well-researched in 1973 than it is today, so it could have slipped past the doctors.

If true, this theory is perhaps more tragic than any other for its sheer preventability: In chasing success and physical perfection, Bruce Lee neglected to care for his body in one of the most fundamental ways possible.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Ball or Heel?

 (recently posted on Facebook by Mr. Ron ChapĂ©l)

It is important in the martial sciences we have a clear understanding that the ball of the foot is for mobility and the heel is for stability. Both have a specific relationship with the rest of the body in general, and the hip joint/femur specifically.

Consider the biomechanics of walking in bipedal anatomical movement. Think of an inverted pendulum that swings from the top, and that “walking” is essentially a series of “swings” or “controlled falls.”

As your walking gait strides forward, you firmly plant your heel on the ground establishing a specific relationship anatomically between the leg and hip joint for “stability” – while simultaneously “pushing off” or rotating onto the ball of the rear foot for stored energy release and “mobility.” Moving rearward reverses that biomechanical function. Additionally, moving rearward while walking shifts the body into “anatomically disassociated” or loose connectivity to move “less efficiently” in momentary violation of the basic “most efficient” forward locomotion design and capability of the human body.

Once you understand this, then you should realize that the act of “pivoting” on the heel violates, (in general) anatomical mandates of stability. When applied to martial arts postures, personal preferences for activity are acceptable in some disciplines. However, in martial science, specific anatomical mandates must not be violated. Moving in martial stances and postures should follow the appropriate physics associated with everyday anatomical mobility and stability extrapolated to martial postures and mobility and you may not replace them with personal preferences or ill-informed teachings.

All movements utilizing stances are specific to the activity, including the whole-body posture in general, and weight distribution, hip, legs, and feet specifically. A lack of understanding or a change in any part of the posture may make any other part moot and dysfunctional whether the desired outcome is stability or movement.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

About Sifu Woo

https://jameswingwoo.com/about-sifu-woo/


Sifu James Wing Woo was born September 26, 1922, on the property of a Standard Oil refinery in Oleum California, north of Oakland. His father had a restaurant there and lived nearby with his wife and children. The Woo family would grow to eight boys (James was the second). Before it did, however, the Woos moved to China. It was 1928, and James was six. But his father had gotten involved in tong wars in the Bay Area, and, as James recalls, had “a price on his head.”

The Woos lived in Canton, the capitol of Kwantung province in the southern part of China, and, within a couple of years, James began learning Tai-Chi from a godfather and various family friends. “I was playing volleyball and I had friends who studied martial arts in the park.” He had plenty of potential mentors. In 1929, Japan invaded the northern part of China and many martial artists in Manchuria and Shanghai moved to Canton. “So I got to meet them and got interested in all of them.” By age 12, he began learning the art of fighting, Shaolin style. He also had a gym teacher who taught martial arts.

As the Japanese threatened to take Canton, the Woo family split up, some members staying as long as they could; others going to Kowloon, and the rest fleeing back to California. In 1938, James and a brother settled in San Francisco. The 16 year-old James attended school and found work as a waiter. He also found use for his martial arts education. “One day, a guy didn’t want to pay and skipped, and I went after him. He took a swing at me. I blocked and hit him, and one of the cooks looked at me and said, ‘You trained a little bit, huh?’ I said, ‘A little bit.’ He said, ‘Let’s see you do this.’ He comes at me. I was by the sink, I go down, and he goes over the sink. Needless to say, I didn’t have that job any more.”

Despite getting into fights worthy of the movies, he was interested in neither. He continued to work as a waiter, and, in 1942, became a military man. He’d been inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, to join the Marines, but when he tried to sign up in Oakland on December 8th, 1941, he was told he’d be accepted only for mess duty. After getting into another fight with a restaurant customer, who led charges against him, James joined the Navy, enlisting in Winslow, Arizona. He did his boot camp training in Idaho and wound up as a ship’s cook, traveling to New Guinea and the Philippines.

Once, while on shore patrol on Treasure Island near San Francisco, he was in Chinatown and, sure enough, got into a fight. “I saw this couple fighting, and I wanted to break it up, and the girl hit me. And then, later on, years later, her girlfriend says to me, ‘Come, I want you to meet my girlfriend.’ I looked at her and said, ‘I know her. She hit me!’ We started going out to dances.” The girl’s name was Eve, and they would marry in 1951.

Out of the Navy by 1945, James took on a variety of jobs, including waiting tables, working in sales, peddling everything from Rena chinaware to automobiles. In the early‘50s, he was also a cable car conductor. Away from work, he practiced Tai Chi in local parks. Many evenings, he would visit a studio run by Lau Bun, who knew James’ father as a fellow member of the social organization, the Hop Sing Tong. James enjoyed spending time with professor Lau and his students, but preferred to work out by himself. One evening, he met a group of Kenpo Karate artists who were visiting from Los Angeles.

In the summer of 1960, James, along with a group of professor Lau Bun’s students, went to Los Angeles, staying with a prominent Kenpo Karate instructor in Pasadena. “I got enticed by this teacher, who was writing a book on Chinese martial arts” said James, who prefers not to identify the man by name. The instructor asked James if he could help him write the book.

After assuring his family of his plans, he returned to Pasadena and assisted the instructor on the book. James also began helping to teach the higher belt classes in the Pasadena gym, for free. James had never thought of himself as a teacher, but, as he reasoned, “I was staying there, and I wasn’t really doing anything.” Actually, he was giving the instructor information for his book, and he was having impact in his classes. “You look at these students,” he said, “and they’re all fast and sloppy. So I slowed them down and taught them forms.”

With the book finished, James went home to San Francisco, where he learned that the Pasadena instructor had found a publisher. However, according to James, it was a bad deal, and he declined to sign the contract. “So I was going to go back to San Francisco, and all these brown belt class students, the higher-ranked students said, ‘Don’t go back. We’ll find another place to open up, and you can teach there.”

James decided to move south, and, in 1961, the Academy of Karate Kung Fu opened in a large storefront at 5440 Hollywood Boulevard. “All the people came,” James remembers, including students of the Pasadena instructor. His wife Eve, with whom he would have three children, stayed in San Francisco, but would join him later. In 1963, he and a partner relocated to a new gym, at 5156 Hollywood Boulevard, and his school was renamed The Chinese Martial Arts Association. In 1986 he would move to Sunset Plaza and, finally, to his current location, where some longtime students continue his teachings.

In the 1970's, with Bruce Lee and other martial artists taking kung fu fighting to the big screen, James and his most accomplished students began drawing attention from Hollywood producers and directors. James got his first role in Sam Peckinpah's Killer Elite in 1975, after he'd almost tossed the director out of his studio. “One day I’m at 5156 Hollywood and I smell somebody coming in with liquor on his breath. I was ready to throw him out. Then his whole entourage came in. ‘Don’t you know who he is? That’s Sam Peckinpah.’ I didn’t know.”

James wound up playing “Tao Yi,” but notes that in all of the 15 roles he has had, from Killer Elite to Lethal Weapon 4 to a recent episode of the TV mystery series,"Monk", he never actually performed martial arts on screen. He has portrayed a priest, a criminal clan leader, an elder martial arts master, and 'a dead Chinese man'. He had never taken a single acting lesson. He said, “I just let it happen.”

James taught martial arts for 53 years until his death in 2014 at the age of 92.


----------

Interesting to hear some of Sifu Woo's side of the story.

Sunday, July 3, 2022

Web of Knowledge - 2nd degree Brown belt

 Web of Knowledge: 2nd degree Brown


Pushes:

fatal cross

circling windmills


Punches:

twirling hammers

destructive kneel

unfolding the dark

escape from darkness

prance of the tiger


Kicks:

destructive cross

bowing to buddha


2 Attacks 1 Man:

dance of darkness

reversing circles

unwinding pendulum

entwined maces

fatal deviation


2 Grabs 2 Men:

marriage of the ram


1 Punch 1 Attack 2 Men:

the ram and the eagle

reprimanding the bears


Weapons:

escape from the storm

circling the storm

piercing lance

capturing the rod

broken rod

defying the rod

twisted rod


Web of Knowledge - 3rd degree Brown belt

 Web of Knowledge: 3rd degree Brown


Grabs and Tackles: 

glancing spear

desperate falcons

dominating circles

blinding sacrifice 

falling falcon


Punches:

thrust into darkness

leap of death

destructive fans


2 Punches 1 Man:

circling fans

protective fans

unfurling crane


2 Kicks 1 Man:

rotating destruction

deceptive panther


2 Grabs 2 Men:

falcons of force

courting the tiger

grasping eagles

snakes of wisdom


1 Punch 1 Attack 2 Men:

bear and the ram

gathering of snakes

parting of the snakes


Weapons:

raining lance

glancing lance

thrusting lance

entwined lance